Which SEO specialty do you identify with the most?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most effective ways to improve your website's performance. However, SEO is not an exact science. There are many different and constantly evolving techniques and strategies you can use to improve your search engine rankings.
Although SEO is a relatively young branch of Digital Marketing, it is no less extensive. In fact, it has reached a point where you can see different specialties, each of which is a world in itself.
That's why it's important to know the different SEO specialties and how they can benefit you. Only then will you be able to apply the right techniques that best suit your project.
While all these specialties differ from each other in many ways, it's important to keep in mind that none of them alone can guarantee the best results, as all of them are useful and necessary to optimize our website for search engines.
Although there is no official classification or formal studies, these could be considered the most distinct branches.
The branches we're referring to are not GitHub branches, but they are also important for SEO.
The SEO copywriter is the specialist in charge of handling and reviewing (and often also creating) quality content written on a website, in order to boost rankings in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The goal of a Content SEO specialist, therefore, is to achieve search engine rankings through the optimization of keywords in website content and the creation of quality content for users.
These are further subdivided into:
They are the creators of texts whose main purpose is to inform and help the reader.
Writers of texts whose main purpose is to sell or promote a product or service.
Analytical SEO focuses on measuring and analyzing website data. This is done using analytical techniques, such as the number of visits, user interaction, bounce rate... to evaluate the content and structure of a website.
The data extracted through analysis is used to generate KPIs (goals to track), user monitoring, and strategies to improve a website's performance, both at the SEO level and in terms of usefulness for the user.
There are companies like Tempe from the Inditex Group where they have dozens of this type of SEO specialists.
Technical SEO is the part of SEO that deals with all the technical aspects of a website from an SEO perspective. This means ensuring the website's code is well optimized, that it can be read by search engines, that the site is indexable and crawlable... For all these reasons, Technical SEO sits halfway between SEO and programming.
While a developer focuses their coding and development knowledge on a system's functionality, a Technical SEO specialist focuses that knowledge on making websites better for search engines and users.
This is my specialty and what I do best. Financially, it is one of the best-paid areas, and due to the demand and the difficulty of finding information about it, especially in Spanish, I decided to create my own Technical SEO Master Course.
Link Building SEO helps build high-quality links from relevant websites to improve a site's ranking.
Due to how "unorganic" it is, it has been losing relevance in Google's eyes (although it still carries significant weight).
Precisely because it's becoming increasingly complex, it requires more study time and experience to develop a professional Link Building strategy, which is why some people specialize specifically in this area.
SXO (Search Experience Optimization) is the fusion of SEO and UX (User Experience) disciplines. For a page's SEO to be well optimized, it's important to consider the user experience, since a poor experience strongly diminishes bounce rate, conversion rate, and overall usefulness for the user. In short, SXO is a specialty that focuses on the impact of user experience on a website or application and applying the necessary changes to improve that experience, so that it positively affects the site's SEO.
CRO is not strictly an SEO specialty, but it is closely related. This discipline focuses on optimizing the conversion of website visitors into customers. It is a continuous process of testing and measuring results to identify areas of opportunity and improve site performance. The goal of CRO is to generate more leads and sales from existing traffic, and not necessarily to increase traffic.
Any platform that segments information based on a specific user's search makes its results susceptible to ranking improvements.
Optimizing SEO for each platform where a business is promoted can be a challenge. Amazon, Doctoralia, YouTube, and Booking are examples of online business platforms, and each one has specific criteria for ranking products or businesses within their search engines. Platform-specialized SEO experts are those who know the best strategies, tools, and ranking factors for a specific platform, enabling them to improve a company's or product's ranking on each of these platforms.
Online media outlets (such as newspapers), due to the peculiarities of the sector, need different SEO strategies compared to other websites, as the competition among these types of pages is very high and ranking content above the rest is more difficult. News SEO specialists focus their strategies primarily on leveraging search trends to be the first to create content for a specific search query. Therefore, the tools used by News SEO specialists are different from the rest, as they rely more on search trends than on search volumes.
App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of improving an application's performance in app stores (App Store, Google Play, etc.), with the goal of getting more downloads and, consequently, more users. ASO involves the use of SEO and marketing techniques to improve an app's ranking in app store search results, as well as to increase the number of downloads and users.
There may be some controversy here, as any SEO professional necessarily needs to understand strategy to achieve results. However, there are people who focus their specialty and work on organizing a content hierarchy or architecture so that it is more understandable to search engines. They also work on developing a strategy for all possible entry points to the website through any type of search intent relevant to the target audience the page is aimed at.
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is a marketing model in which money is invested to promote a website through search engines (SERP), to boost the visibility and traffic of a website. SEM includes the use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and Search Engine Advertising (SEA) techniques, which include pay-per-click (PPC) and content marketing, to achieve results.
GEO is an evolution of traditional SEO that focuses on how Large Language Models (LLMs) —such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or similar tools— identify, extract, and use your content to generate responses. Instead of ranking URLs in a results list, GEO aims for your brand and content to be recognized and cited by these AI engines when answering queries.
Although many effective practices are the same as in traditional SEO (technical structure, clear content, authority), the GEO approach particularly emphasizes:
It's not about replacing traditional SEO, but about expanding it to also cover visibility in generative environments.
Here is an example of what working on GEO looks like.
Although these specialties exist, generally any professional SEO knows to a greater or lesser extent parts of each one. If someone is specialized in any of them, it means they have deep knowledge in that area.
I currently offer advanced SEO training in Spanish. Would you like me to create an English version? Let me know!
Tell me you're interested